Things that keep me up at night (Part I)

The list the title alludes to could go on. For instance, just last week I had a dream that started out oh-so-promising, a trip to Conneaut Lake, that snow-covered iced-over wonderland. But as it turned out, it was just the setting for a debate as to whether I should use credit cards cleverly and extensively so as to increase my credit score or continue to thumb my nose at credit cards for most purchases because I don’t believe in the system. This sort of came out of nowhere, but I bet I’ll be thinking a lot about it the next few nights. This saddens me, because it is not interesting.

But the good news is that there are better things to concern myself with while I try to convince my brain that it’s time to rest. I’ve read two excellent posts in the last week that will also keep me up thinking, and that’s great because they’re far more interesting than the tortuous calculations of credit scores that would otherwise fill my brain. I’d originally planned to discuss both of them in this post, but I found I had more thoughts about them than I had anticipated, so I’ve split this post in twain.
The first post, which addresses the essential point to this blog, is from Jonathon at Arrant Pedantry. It succinctly summarizes the great battle between prescriptivists (boo!) and descriptivists (yay?). More importantly, he asks the essential questions that both sides attempt to ignore because they don’t submit to obvious answers. For instance, it’s obvious that language users benefit from the observance of some conventions in the language — even the most dyed-in-the-wool descriptivist will admit to this. If we permitted free word order in English, the language just wouldn’t work; we wouldn’t know who to mourn if someone said “Barry Terry killed”, for instance. But how many conventions does a language need? How do we identify beneficial conventions? And, to the point of this blog, when descriptivists say a language is one way and prescriptivists argue it should be another, how can we adjudicate between them? I think these questions are the ones that anyone who claims to be concerned about language needs to keep in mind, and it’s nice to have them clearly stated.

The key question that arises for me is: when is it useful to intercede on language’s behalf? I really don’t know myself — there are some situations where it is probably good (I’m thinking, for instance, of apostrophication) and there are some situations where it is probably bad (for instance, pretty much anything James Cochrane wrote about in his book). But what are the general underlying principles that differentiate useful and useless rules? My first guess was that a useful intercession is one that preserves an important distinction in the language. For instance, grocer’s and grocers’ pick out two different concepts; the former is singular and the latter is plural. However, the distinction between singular and plural is hardly inviolate in English — deer, fish, you, etc. are the same in singular and plural. Is it really a problem, then, if we lose a distinction between singular and plural in possessives? (*See below for my opinion.) My naive proposal has just pushed the question further down; instead of asking what is a good rule to impose, the question becomes what distinctions are important to retain, and the answer to that is still more muddled.

My thoughts on the matter are that this is not a question with a unique best answer. However, it’s one that every author (myself included) needs to try to answer before making their commentaries about what is and isn’t good English, and need to revise while making the commentaries. I’d love to hear your answers, especially since I imagine a lot of you readers have less stringent beliefs about what makes a rule useful than I do.

* My answer is that despite the presence of zero-morpheme plurals in English (e.g., one deer, two deer), users of the language exhibit a desire to maintain a clear singular/plural distinction. Educated adults (e.g., me) often say things like I saw two deers in the road or I’m pretty sure this squirrel is of a different specie than that one. The nouns that don’t have a clear singular/plural distinction are rare, often old or borrowed, and are highly susceptible to regularization. Even the pronoun you has a cornucopia of colloquial plural forms, such as y’all, yinz/yunz, you’uns, you all, and yous/youze. So I would be unwilling to say that English speakers are willing to tolerate a lack of singular/plural distinction. Despite this, speakers of other languages get along fine without a singular/plural distinction (Chinese, for instance), so it isn’t the case that losing a singular/plural distinction in English is insurmountable.

About The Blog

A lot of people make claims about what "good English" is. Much of what they say is flim-flam, and this blog aims to set the record straight. Its goal is to explain the motivations behind the real grammar of English and to debunk ill-founded claims about what is grammatical and what isn't. Somehow, this was enough to garner a favorable mention in the Wall Street Journal.

About Me

I'm Gabe Doyle, currently a postdoctoral scholar in the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University. Before that, I got a doctorate in linguistics from UC San Diego and a bachelor's in math from Princeton.

In my research, I look at how humans manage one of their greatest learning achievements: the acquisition of language. I build computational models of how people can learn language with cognitively-general processes and as few presuppositions as possible. Currently, I'm working on models for acquiring phonology and other constraint-based aspects of cognition.

I also examine how we can use large electronic resources, such as Twitter, to learn about how we speak to each other. Some of my recent work uses Twitter to map dialect regions in the United States.

4 comments

Good post. As a dyed-in-the-wool descriptivist, let me say that the reason some conventions are beneficial is because they’re part of the grammar. No native speaker says or writes “Barry Terry killed” as a complete clause (except as a metalinguistic example like we’re making right now). Such examples are violations of English grammar because they never occur and are not naturally producible or comprehensible by native speakers (as you say). This isn’t something we can influence, like “it’s I/it’s me”. imo it’s part of our unconscious knowledge about how our language works.

You might be on to something with the apostrophe in grocer’s and grocers’. otoh, they’re identical in speech.

Dang. Now I feel lame for not updating my blog with anything good lately. Thanks for the link, though.

As I said in that post, I’m fine with being a prescriptivist when it comes to spelling and even things like punctuation to an extent (though I often punctuate more by feel than by strict adherence to a style guide). I think written language is greatly helped by having some standard conventions. I also think that most prescriptivists focus far too much on the irrelevant things.

I just realized something (and it might just be my current environment) missing from your discussion: Why does a language’s grammar need a gatekeeper? If language is a complex emergent system than the crazyness will have to sort itself out. It’s not likely that incorrect apostrophe placement or confusion amongst their/they’re/there is going to bring down written communication. Future generations are not likely to see written communication as a useless tool of the 20th century because of 1337 5p33k.

If you happen to be reading/editing something that is incoherent, then you tell the author why it was incoherent. If you stumble over an incorrect use of their/they’re/there and it has influenced your processing of that sentence, you explain to the author why that’s going to be a problem and how they should fix it.

But if you’re not an editor then you should probably let the system fix itself. That’s basically the problem with prescriptivist. They think that if they’re not there to save us from ourselves, we’ll not be able to communicate with our children or grandchildren. I think language is a hell of a lot more stable as a system than, say, weather or fox/rabbit populations. The population of native speakers isn’t going to allow some new, complex form if it can’t compensate for the increase in complexity.

Now, if you want someone to become a good writer, then, by all means, you should teach them how to write to their audience. You can teach them messed up rules like the split infinitive and suggest how they should use it when they write to oxford educated assholes. You can teach them how they shouldn’t spell forever like 4eva and ate like 8 on their job application, because they’ll look like morons. You can teach them why and how to use whom and not to end a sentence with a preposition. But do this NOT for the sake of your language or your children’s language. Do it for the personal growth of the person you are providing the wisdom to.

In one hundred and fifty years, they’re/their/there may all be written as one word “ther”, OR they may be pronounced completely differently in order to make their written form less confusable, OR nothing will have changed. But whatever happens, it will probably have little if anything to do with what one blog, or one book, or one professor has to say about it. The only effect you’ll have on language is by the way you use it yourself. If you’ve got a popular blog, then your written style is likely to propagate, but that’s about as good as you’ll be able to do in the scheme of things. The language system is an emergent system and grows and changes not with individual speakers but with all the speakers.